


In those Dark Hours

by salable_mystic



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Bujold
Genre: Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-29
Updated: 2010-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:38:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salable_mystic/pseuds/salable_mystic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cordelia ponders her life on Barrayar, raising two quite different, but equally vulnerable children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In those Dark Hours

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally written for a "apprechiate the parents" livejournal community, for the topic of "mothers".

There weren't that many days on which Cordelia Naismith-Vorkosigan truly regretted leaving her home planet. Or rather, _fleeing_ her home planet, if she was honest with herself - and being honest with herself was something she always tried to be. You couldn't always be honest with everyone around you, but with yourself, you not only could be honest at all times, but you really ought to be, she thought. So, no, there weren't that many days on which she truly regretted coming to Barrayar, certainly not as many as were the days on which she delighted in _grousing_ about having come to Barrayar, often to the delight of Aral. There were some, of course, had been even before that soltoxin gas attack. And there had been  ... more ... since. But, over all, she didn’t think there were too many of them. Coming to live on a planet as different from Beta Colony as Barrayar indisputably was, one was bound to have second thoughts, suffer from culture shock, feel alienated, the lot. So really, she was glad to report (to herself alone, but still) all in all, she was coping rather well. Adjusting nicely. Getting to grips with the situation. Adapting well. Had been transplanted successfully. Name your term, she'd done it okay.

And there weren’t too many days filled with regret, either, when she came to think about it. Or too many nights - though nights were by far the better moments for attacks of quiet self doubt than bright and busy sunlit hours, really.

Aral was here, for one, and terribly dear to her - and now Gregor and Miles were here too, and just as dear. And then there was motherhood, she thought with a wry smile, and it really suited her quite well.

What she wasn't at all sure about was how well her assuming the role of a sort of foster-mother to Gregor suited _Barrayar_. Not that anyone on Barrayar - except Aral, and his amusement had been precious to her - seemed to actually have _realized_ just what they had handed her when they passed the education of the heir of the whole Barrayaran Imperium over to a ... a – what was it they called her, sometimes, when they thought she wasn’t listening? – ah, yes, 'an useless Betan Frill'. Barrayaran men could be surprisingly narrow-sighted, sometimes.

Though in her quieter moments, in those too still hours of the night, she sometimes wondered if she was doing right by Gregor, raising him the way she was, with Betan morals and Betan standards influencing his education.

 

Not that she would ever be truly capable of not letting her own culture - she still considered Betan her culture and always would, she thought - influence her raising of her children - and Gregor was hers now, too, in all but blood, she thought with a fierce gladness and that odd possessiveness that she had come to associate with motherhood - but she didn't even try. Did not truly want to try. But ... just how well _would_ Barrayar suit him when he had grown to maturity - and he Barrayar?

But then, he had Aral for the Barrayaran mores, lores, rules, morals, standards and all that other often tedious and still frequently bewildering stuff.

 

Sometimes, she thought, the truly bewildering thing was that such an alien culture as Barrayar still seemed to her was one that had been formed by humans in the first place. You'd expect green skin, tentacles, and the hypnotizing bug eyes from those old earth stories she let Gregor believe she didn't know he watched with Miles sometimes (after they were both supposed to be asleep), not humans! So similar, and yet so bewilderingly unlike anything she had known before she'd arrived here. A good thing she loved puzzles and challenges, indeed. Even though there weren’t any bug-eyed monsters to be found, at least when one went by outer appearances! Though as to the personalities of some of the more, ah, conservative elements of Barrayaran society she had encountered, she really couldn’t say one way or the other. And wasn't Count Vornurriel rather bug-eyed, now that she thought about it?

 

Still, albeit no alien monsters had yet been sighted on Barrayar, if Gregor and Miles escaped into bad fictions about outer space together, watching the space operas human minds from a dozen planets had come up with over the last centuries, that was fine with her. They might learn something about how to deal with foreign cultures. Or bug-eyed monsters. Or maybe just something about bad special effects. Useful knowledge, the lot of it.

 

Either way, as long as she knew where their bodies were - that the Imperial Heir and a small boy with bones as brittle as dried earth were not climbing out of a window of the Imperial Palace to have a grand adventure in Vorbarr Sultana, right under the noses of the Imperial Guards supposed to be watching them  - and had _that_ not been a terrifying evening - she was quite content to let their minds escape into the holovid lures of outer space. Every child needed its own moment of feeling like he was outsneaking his (foster-)parents, and her two surely had cause to need it more than most others.

 

For all their differences in age and approach to life this was something the two of them seemed to truly enjoy doing together, and for that she was glad. Gregor was such a quiet, pensive boy, who preferred to ponder a new situation before carefully and slowly engaging with it, whereas Miles seemed to prefer to throw himself into new things without thinking twice - or even blinking once! And while Gregor to her seemed pretty set in his general approach to life by now, with Miles one still could hope that he might, at some point, learn a little caution. Maybe. Hopefully. He was still so very young, after all, and yet seemed to be catching up for all the time he had not been able to walk, or even crawl, from having been born with a fused spine. So a little less blind initiative and action in his general approach to life was still to be hoped for.

Yet, for all that she felt that with Miles she and Aral were perfecting the art of "standing back and hoping for the best" to an artform, sometimes she worried about Gregor more.

Miles was an open book, voicing his pleasures, delights and troubles to his parents and the people around him without thinking too much about it. With Miles she constantly worried about broken bones, but she rarely had to wonder what was going through his mind. She had only to listen to him and he would tell her. Though this would undoubtedly change as he grew older, for now this unconscious openness was definitely a blessing to those around him.

Gregor, by contrast, sometimes seemed too quiet, too pensive to her, and she feared the responsibility that the profoundly illogical way of running an Empire that had been bestowed upon him might one day crush him. Eat the charming, pensive boy up, swallow him whole or chew him into tiny little bits and leave a too-serious man behind, a man who would not remember that he, too, was allowed to smile.

Miles, she knew, for all the obstacles he would have to face on Barrayar simply for having been born the way he was, with the teratogenic damage to his bones in a society that abhorred mutations, could have, would have, the chance to escape, if it came to that. (This was a thought she had never - and probably would never - share with Aral, for it was a solution that would be almost unbearably painful to the man, and definitely a situation where complete honesty with others was overrated. Yet it remained a glad thought for her, and would undoubtedly continue to be.)

If nothing else, there always would be Beta Colony for Miles.

But for Gregor, for Gregor there could be no escape, at all.

  
So she let both her boys escape into fantasies a couple of nights every month, while they still could ... for in the darkest hours of the night – those hours when she did come oh-so-close to regretting ever having come here in the first place - she knew that in reality Barrayar, some day, one day, might just consume them both and leave nothing of the boys she loved behind.

Those dark hours were the hours when she curled up a little closer to Aral, and let the peace his firm - if oblivious - embrace brought her soothe her troubled spirit.

For with Aral and her as their guardians, for now, Barrayar would have to go through them both before getting to either one of her boys. And she would rather make a difference for Gregor here, where she could make a difference, than be out in space, or back on Beta Colony. Her universe had shrunken to just the one planet, to politics she didn't care for and a system she deemed absurd, but it had also grown richer in the shrinking. And for now, with Aral beside her and her boys safely asleep, safe from demands that would too soon be thrust upon them, that was just as it ought to be.

  



End file.
